November 29, 2014

Friday Night Movies 504

None of us had seen the 1993 Wong Jing film Future Cops. It and our second feature turned up on Amazon Prime. It's an Andy Lau and Jackie Cheung movie with Chingmy Yau, Simon Yam, Richard Ng, Aaron Kwok, Ekin Cheng and many more fine Chinese actors. It's vaguely based on the Street Fighter video game but they didn't have the rights to use the character names and they don't follow any of the game's stories. I didn't play the game when it was new but I've seen plenty of media coverage about it. Jackie Chan's City Hunter uses some characters from the SF game and the Street Fighter movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme is based on the game. I've seen both of those. City Hunter came out 6 months before and it has the same director as Future Cops. Both of them were part of the 9 films that Wong Jing directed in 1993. He has 106 directing credits and 173 writing credits on the IMDb. Street Fighter was directed by Steven E. de Souza and it came out in 1994.

In Future Cops we meet some folks living in 2043. The General is angry because Judge Yu Ti Hung sentenced him to jail time. He sends his toadies into the past to kill the judge while he was in high school. The police send their crack team, the Future Cops, back in time to save the future judge. They get to Yu Ti Hung first and Andy Lau joins him in school as a student, Simon Yam is his body guard and Jackie Cheung is the music teacher. The villains don't turn up for nearly half the movie so there's time for plenty of high school silliness, romance and slapstick. There's plenty of action once the time travelling baddies show up. It's not Wong's best but I laughed quite a bit and enjoyed the movie. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it too. You can see it on YouTube and I've stuck a link in the post somewhere.

Our second feature is the 2013 Hong Kong horror film Rigor Mortis. It's director Juno Mak's first film and he wanted to harken back to the 1980's type of horror films like Mr Vampire and Encounters Of The Spooky Kind. He hired actors who were in those horror films to be in his film. Chin Siu-ho, Anthony Chang and Billy Lau were in Mr Vampire, Richard Ng was in Mr Vampire 3 and Chung Fat was in Encounters of the Spooky Kind. Mak creates a moody and quite visually interesting film, even though it's mostly gray. There's plenty of darn good cgi and a lot of it is used sparingly to compliment some prop or set. I liked the arms of the ghost women which move about inhumanly and their fingers which bend in unnatural ways. It's pretty creepy and not very happy.

Chin Siu-ho plays a fictional version of himself. He's fallen on hard times, he's lost his wife and child, he has no work and he's going to hang himself. He rents an apartment in a run down tenement building. His hanging is interrupted by the two ghost gals and a retired vampire hunter. The vampire hunter is played by Anthony Chang who played the Taoist Priest in Mr Vampire.

More and more supernatural things happen and people start dying. Unlike the films director Mak is referring to his film doesn't have much by way of humor. Nothing that comes to mind the day after, it's all rather relentlessly dark and grimm. It might be one of the reason's Rigor Mortis doesn't score as well on the IMDb, 6.4 to 7.6, as Mr Vampire does. It got mentioned in a good number of reviews. Another thing people mentioned is the ending. I saw it and could only ask myself "What does he mean by that?" Luckily for me I can just not think about it and move on. I wouldn't need to see the film again but I'm not sorry I did see it. I'd rather watch the Mr Vampire films again. Luckily for me I already have them.